


Stop Making Plans, Start Making Sense

by paperclipbitch



Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Canon Bisexual Character, Loki is Loki, M/M, Post-Canon, Trolling, Wooing, david needs to get laid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 13:02:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4626249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Holy shit,” Tommy breathes, when he opens David’s office door.  “Did… did you <i>die</i>?”</p><p>David looks at the literal thousands of red roses adorning every surface of his office, and says: “I have no idea.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stop Making Plans, Start Making Sense

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WildAndFreeHearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildAndFreeHearts/gifts).



> [Title from _Summer Hair = Forever Young_ by The Academy Is... because that's what I'm listening to rn tbh.] Written for **WildAndFreeHearts** for the **mm_rares** exchange; they wanted some kind of humour fluff for this pairing, which I had a stab at (being slightly better at angst!) Set after _Young Avengers_ v2, and Loki's definitely got his magic back.

It’s pretty much an anti-climax, in the end.

David goes back to his life, even manages to go back to his job, and things tick along exactly like they used to, except that he gets periodic texts from the other Young Avengers – particularly from Kate, with an alarming array of medical questions he assumes she’s going to try and implement on Barton – and he has a lot more traumatic memories. He was pretty sure he already had a brain full of traumatic memories, there was no room for more, but that’s the world for you: always determined to get the last laugh.

“We should get you laid, man,” Tommy says, reaching over the table to steal his coffee. “We’ll get you girls, or boys that aren’t already dating my brother, or one of each-”

“That’s not technically how bisexuality works,” David says, and Tommy rolls his eyes and drinks his pilfered coffee.

“I’m just _saying_ ,” he says. “I’m this close to setting you up on tindr and grindr and seeing which one pays off for you.”

“Please don’t do that,” David responds. His lunches with Tommy tend to be more exhausting than the rest of the day put together, but he’s grateful for them. They remind him to get out of his office and look at the world from time to time. 

“I’m just saying, you’re being kind of a bummer, man,” Tommy says, and David takes his coffee cup back to find that it’s already empty, of course it is. “And the most action you’ve gotten lately is that awkward kiss we had at New Year’s, and Loki hitting on you. You could do without the clusterfuck of team dating, I’m just saying.”

David presumes Tommy would know, after all, and this must show on his face because Tommy just rolls his eyes and turns his attention back to his sandwich.

And, well, yes, it’s been done crudely, and awkwardly, but nothing Tommy has said is _wrong_ , exactly. It’s just… well, David’s not sure what it’s _just_ , and decides to put it out of his head for the afternoon. Which, with a mind like his, is obviously easier said than done, but he’ll give it a good _try_ , anyway.

-

“Loki’s liked another one of my Instagram photos,” Billy says, looking dubious. “It’s that one that Tommy posted of me that I didn’t know he’d even taken, so it’s not, like, flattering, so is he liking it to say hi or to laugh at me?”

Kate doesn’t even remove her smoothie straw from her mouth to say: “probably both.”

“Does anyone actually know where Loki is these days?” David asks, because discreet and indiscreet enquiries haven’t yielded much, and though everyone’s kind of loath to admit it, they’d at the very least gotten _used_ to him. And also, his unpaid breakfast bills keep ambushing them at any and every diner they try to go into. David could really do with some compensation.

“I did try some spells,” Billy says, “but they go kind of… screwy.” He wiggles his fingers vaguely. “I assume that’s because I created him, or, whatever that thing I did was.”

David was in charge of trying to trace Loki’s IP address or wherever it is that he’s doing all this casual web surfing from, but that came up a blank as well. Maybe he has some kind of magical smartphone now.

“I guess he doesn’t want to be found,” Teddy says, but he looks kind of sad about it. Sure, Loki was a weirdly annoying kid and then a weirdly attractive yet still annoying teenager, and so morally ambiguous that it kind of made your eyes hurt just to look at him, but it’s amazing what you can get used to.

And anyway, David would like to find him. He’s not examining why too much, okay.

-

“You are _no fun at all_ , dude,” Tommy complains, flopping into David’s desk chair.

David ignores him, and finishes explaining how to defuse yet another skrull bomb to the shaky-voiced guy on the other end of the phone.

Tommy starts rearranging everything on David’s desk quicker than he can see him doing it, because Tommy is the worst.

“ _What_ ,” David sighs, five minutes later, when he’s hung up the phone and nothing on the other end of the line has gone ‘boom’.

“I’m just here to tell you that you’re the biggest buzz kill ever ever _ever_ ,” Tommy explains, finally returning to the chair again, now all of David’s pens and papers and annoying plastic desk… things that people he knows keep buying him are in such a mess it’ll take a good half hour at least to get them back into the right places.

“Not that this is anything new,” David says, “but why in particular _today_?”

Tommy rolls his eyes elaborately. “Like you don’t know,” he scoffs. “But if you want it spelled out, you could at least have left the profiles up for a _day_ before you deleted them.”

David sifts through Tommy’s jumble of words, and then figures out: “did you create me some online dating profiles even though I _expressly told you not to_ on _more than one occasion_?”

Tommy shrugs. “This speed thing, I don’t always remember the really long boring stuff,” he says. “And yeah, you could’ve left your profiles up, you were getting hits and everything!”

David considers all this carefully. “I had no idea that you did any of that,” he tells Tommy.

“But I did it with your email addresses!” Tommy protests, which David is going to have to deal with at some point, and presumably change all his passwords too. Tommy leans over the desk, frowning at him. “Wow, you really _don’t_ know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“I’m catching on,” David says, as the phone starts ringing again. “But, no. Now, out.”

“If you didn’t delete your tindr and grindr profiles, then who did?” Tommy muses on his way out. “Ha, maybe the internet rejected you.”

David ignores him, as Tommy’s laughter drifts down the hall after him.

-

Later on, David is curious enough to restore his profiles, though he does change all the words Tommy used, because he’s not always completely sure what he wants out of his dating/app-hooking-up, but is pretty sure it’s nothing that Tommy’s idea of a bio will get him.

David’s not lonely, but he’s not _not_ lonely. You know. It’s a process.

Anyway, he gets some messages and some hits, and decides he can’t face it all tonight, but he’ll properly sort through them tomorrow. He hesitates, mid-swipe, over a guy with longish dark hair, who doesn’t look like Loki unless you squint, and then he hates his brain for going there anyway.

In the morning, he no longer has tindr or grindr profiles, no messages, no emails, no nothing. They’ve all vanished as though they were never there. When he goes to restore them, neither app has a memory of his username or email.

David narrows his eyes, because _something_ is happening here.

-

“Holy shit,” Tommy breathes, when he opens David’s office door. “Did… did you _die_?”

David looks at the literal thousands of red roses adorning every surface of his office, and says: “I have no idea.”

He shakes his head and blinks a few times, and the roses remain stubbornly there. A bunch or two of them would probably smell nice, but right now the perfume is overwhelming, and he shuts the door just as Tommy starts sneezing.

“Roses aren’t for when people die,” David decides in the end. “So I don’t think we have to worry about that.”

“Maybe they’re poisoned roses,” Tommy suggests, expression dubious. “Do you know any supervillain evil florists?”

The saddest thing is that isn’t even an unreasonable question these days.

“They are red roses,” David says slowly, carefully, like the world is fragile and might crack if he talks too loudly. “I mean, they _do_ have romantic connotations.”

Tommy opens the door again, sneezes three times in a row, and slams it closed. “Who do you know who can afford that many damn roses?”

Something ticks in David’s brain; he tries to catch it, but he’s not quick enough, and it slips away again. It’s there, though, he thinks; the answer is _there_.

“Can you get them out so I can go to work?” he asks Tommy hopefully.

Tommy’s response is another, even louder, sneeze, so David assumes not.

He calls Billy in the end, who gets David to do a few calculations for him and then starts magically transferring the flowers to various local hospitals.

“It’s kind of romantic?” he suggests when David’s office is clear, except for several hundred loose petals that he’s apparently going to need to clear up himself. 

“Not creepy?” David asks. He’s been answering the phone as best he can while Billy worked around him, but he’s still gotten very little done this morning.

“It can be both,” Billy tells him, and grins at him as he leaves.

-

Three days later, it’s chocolate boxes.

David’s office no longer smells like roses, but the wave of sweetness that rolls over him when he comes in today is… quite something.

“Dude!” Tommy says delightedly, when David calls him, and pulls a gold ribbon off a box.

“What happened to ‘what if they’re poisoned’?” David asks. “I mean, I could know some supervillain evil chocolatiers.”

“Don’t be silly,” Tommy says with his mouth full, “there’s no such thing as an evil chocolatier.”

David waits until Tommy’s superquick metabolism will have processed the chocolates he’s eaten just in case they _do_ turn out to be poisoned, and then reaches for one of the boxes.

Over the course of the next few hours, David learns that no one really pays attention to what he actually does at work, as long as the phone gets picked up. Tommy has apparently texted everyone in his phone, because increasing numbers of people start dropping by to help themselves to free chocolate and wander off again. Kate turns up, early afternoon, with Clint Barton, who waves a vague hand at David and then goes to rummage through the various shiny boxes in the top drawer of David’s filing cabinet. Kate makes a face at David, and shrugs, and goes to help him.

By the end of the day, David only has something left like twenty boxes of eye-wateringly expensive chocolates, which he’s pretty sure he’s entitled to keep.

“Definitely being wooed, dude,” Tommy says, and then cackles.

There’s that ringing in David’s head again, louder.

-

Monday night, David gets home, opens the front door, and finds his apartment is full of kittens. 

They’re adorable kittens. They’re small and fluffy and many of them have little bows around their necks, and they’re gambolling about and mewing and snoozing and leaping on each other. It’s like the world’s best youtube video, happening right in front of him.

David stands in the doorway for a long moment, watching the little balls of fluff roll about, and then closes the door and goes to see if he can crash on someone else’s couch for the night.

-

Friday night, a bright yellow post-it appears on David’s computer screen, with the name of a pretty swanky restaurant and 9pm written on it.

It’s swift enough that it could’ve been Tommy, dashing in and out before David could see him, but he’s pretty sure Tommy isn’t behind all this; he’s not going to take his trolling to this kind of level.

David considers his options, and goes home after work, and tells himself it’s either a) a trap that’s going to end in murdering, or b) a terrible idea, and either way, he won’t go. He tells himself this even when he’s taking a shower and digging a suit out of his closet and walking to the subway.

Loki is waiting for him outside, hair longer and soft-looking, expression unreadable, but gentler than David’s seen before. He’s mercifully not holding flowers, chocolates, _or_ kittens.

“I was _pretty_ sure it was you,” David tells him. “Only you could combine wooing with trolling that masterfully.”

“Billy told me not do to the balloons,” Loki replies. 

“I was expecting more mixtapes,” David says. “Where’s my entire bucket of mixtapes?”

“You have to do something mixtape-worthy,” Loki tells him. “Feeding your chocolates to off-duty Avengers doesn’t count.”

David smiles, and tilts his head toward the restaurant. “Did you manage to get reservations, or are you actually just going to take me for burgers somewhere cheap around the corner?”

“It wouldn’t be incredibly fancy showing-off wooing if I didn’t have reservations,” Loki says, and his tone is snotty but his smirk is a little softer at the edges than David would’ve expected. It’s… kind of nice, actually.

David follows him toward the entrance, but he hesitates. “If I go for dinner with you, you aren’t going to fill my office and/or apartment with stuffed animals, are you?”

Loki turns, and his eyes are sparkling. “ _Please_ ,” he says, “I’m saving those until you put out, anyway.”

He opens the door for him and David lets him.

 _I was hoping it was you_ , David thinks, but he decides he’ll save admitting that for later; right now, Loki clearly doesn’t need the encouragement.

-


End file.
